Saturday, February 02, 2008

An Army of Beautiful but Nervous Young Men.

I was fascinated by his seminarians. In Rome, I'd see them in their Mercedes bus, perfectly dressed in clerical garb and reading their breves on the way to the Gregorian University while we of the American college walked the route in our jeans, smoking and stopping for coffee/and. They were so handsome, and all cut from the same heartbreakingly gorgeous cloth. He had hand-picked them. Thick shiny and wavy black hair identically and neatly cut. Square jawed. High cheek bones under dreamy sad eyes. Broad shouldered. Kept in regimentally perfect shape. Large hands turned the pages of those prayer books nestled in the smoldering laps of their athletic bodies. I'd always catch the eye of one or another of them and in that instant, he would know that I knew what no one was supposed to know.

Thank you, for I thought I was alone. The most uncomfortable memory I have of my formerly Catholic life is being "chosen" by a Brazilian LC layman, chosen as a boy amongst other boys, separated from girls, and then being rejected - denied! hated! - soon after he found out about certain things. I never had the heart to remind him of their own founder.